The PM must be glad that Parliament is in recess as MPs are spread all over and cannot form a huddle and plot her overthrow. Asking Boris to apologise has not put her in a good light with party activists, most of whom object to the face veil and want a wider debate on the issue. Meanwhile Boris Is happy to play the martyr and say nothing.

Boris wars
There’s something inherently illiberal about trying to gag him
The Spectator

Ever since Boris Johnson resigned as foreign secretary, it was generally assumed that there would — in time — be a dramatic clash with Theresa May. But it was thought that the Prime Minister would pick her battle over a point of principle, perhaps on Europe, rather than over a joke in his Daily Telegraph column. Boris was defending the right of Muslims to wear what they like in public, but added that he thinks niqabs look like letterboxes. The ministerial reaction has been extraordinary, and deeply unedifying.

Boris’s point was that, in banning the niqab, Denmark had passed a surprisingly illiberal piece of legislation — all the more surprising in that it has emerged from a country often viewed as a bastion of liberty. It is not, he argued, the business of the state to lay down the law on what individuals can and cannot wear in public, beyond the demands of public decency. While there are good reasons to ask people to remove head-coverings when security considerations demand it, such as in airports or public buildings, that is not the same as a blanket ban which has clearly been concocted to target a particular religious group.

But freedom also means freedom to mock this peculiar Arab fashion and point out that there is no scriptural basis for it in the Koran. In a recent Spectator article, Qanta Ahmed pointed out how much trouble she has explaining to non-Muslims that her faith requires modesty, but not a veil. It is the extremists who demand that women cover up, who depend on the ignorance of the West to think that such dress is a fundamental part of Islam.

There are plenty more Muslims who agree — for example Dr Taj Hargey, an imam and director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, who in 2014 launched a campaign for a British burka ban. He described the attire as ‘an archaic tribal piece of cloth that is eagerly used by fundamentalist zealots to promote a toxic brand of extremist non-Koranic theology’— which is a little stronger than describing burka-clad women as looking like letterboxes. Are Boris’s detractors going to describe Dr Hargey as Islamophobic?

It is fundamental to liberalism to defend the right of people to hold views with which you disagree. This is a concept which increasingly seems to be lost in modern politics. Look at the way the former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron was deposed after failing to deny claims that he considered gay sex to be sinful. Farron tried to argue that his personal faith mattered less than his public position: he had voted for gay marriage. That didn’t matter to his critics.

Liberty also means letting our elected representatives feel free to speak their minds, as long as they stay broadly behind the manifesto on which they stood for election. Boris’s joke was not statesmanlike, but his wider point, in defence of freedom, was brilliant and timely. This should be seen as a test case for anyone calling themselves a liberal. It might seem in bad taste; you might disagree, but in a free society we tolerate disagreement.

And why is anyone surprised that Boris made an irreverent joke? His humour and his refusal to be cowed help to explain why he was twice elected mayor of a Labour city, and why he was so immensely valuable to the Leave campaign during the referendum. That, of course, is the real reason Boris has been attacked. He is too dangerous. Several Tories realise that Mrs May’s Brexit strategy may soon implode and that if it does, then the party at large may seek new leadership. They realise that the former mayor of London, who has a loyal following and an often-demonstrated ability to make the political weather, is the bookmakers’ favourite.

In attacking Boris, the Tories have ended up looking like squabbling self-obsessives — the kind of party that ought not to be left in charge of a country. As a rule, cabinet members do not denounce fellow backbenchers unless they say or do something truly outrageous. Boris Johnson wrote an article in defence of current government policy, yet ended up facing an orchestrated attack from the culture secretary, the Tory chairman, a defence minister, a Foreign Office minister and the Prime Minister herself, over an issue about which most voters will be on Boris’s side. If anything, voters may think that he does not go far enough because he does not back a ban.

We hear continuously that Brexit is narrow-minded nationalism. There is simply no room in the minds of those who believe this for someone like Boris, who combines social and economic liberalism with a dim opinion of the institution that is the EU. But his politics are those of the Conservative mainstream, and for a former foreign secretary to be attacked in this way shows a worrying disconnect between the Tory leadership and party members. Mrs May is entitled to treat every backbench intervention as a leadership challenge. But in doing so, she makes such a challenge more likely.

"You know, there really exist certain people to whom it is assigned, at their birth, to have all sorts of extraordinary things happen to them" Mikhail Lermontov

"There are plenty more Muslims who agree — for example Dr Taj Hargey, an imam and director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, who in 2014 launched a campaign for a British burka ban. He described the attire as ‘an archaic tribal piece of cloth that is eagerly used by fundamentalist zealots to promote a toxic brand of extremist non-Koranic theology’— which is a little stronger than describing burka-clad women as looking like letterboxes. Are Boris’s detractors going to describe Dr Hargey as Islamophobic?"

No! His comment although strongly worded is not rude and is basically correct. A burka is simply a man's way of saying to other men "this is my woman you will not at her as a person only as a faceless unimportant shape"

Brian Dixon likes this

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I try to be neutral and polite but it is hard at times.
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Berk Boris's burka blunder. The Expectorate can't save him from that particular confusion, despite their attempted quiet elision. But from one whose sartorial sense is of the rumpled and ill-fitting Gordon Brown variety, you wouldn't expect anything else. Niqabs to him.

Envy is one of the seven deadly sins and a particularly poisonous one, for it is not an excess of something reasonable but entirely devoid of merit. Boris Johnson, because of his many successes, popularity with voters and charisma, attracts more than his fair share of this disagreeable vice. The excitement caused by his comments on the burka are a symptom of this, as is the publication of the complaint to the Conservative Party’s “hotline”, which anyone may call on (020) 7984 8050 if they are so minded.

In Mr Johnson’s Telegraph article, he writes that the burka ought not to be banned. This is a liberal view entirely in line with the historic freedom the British expect to enjoy. Although early parliaments had an obsession with dress codes, for status and economic reasons, it is not an area where legislation has intruded for centuries. This nation is not one that proscribes particular clothes, and it treads upon people’s liberties with caution. This is unlike the Continental tradition which has always been more willing to accept a powerful and authoritarian state.

Why would senior Conservatives want to attack so popular a figure for saying something that had been said before, and which they had not objected to? If women want to cover their faces, they ought to be free to do so. Nuns must be allowed to wear wimples, traditionalists at Holy Mass the mantilla – although that only covers the hair – brides a veil and Muslim ladies a burka.

This is not necessarily a populist argument. Mr Johnson, had he tested his article with focus groups and opinion polls first, would have found that the country at large is more draconian than he wants to be. As it happens, I entirely agree with him. Mr Johnson then went beyond the limits of intolerant liberals and criticised the appearance of the burka. He denied that it adds to the wearer’s pulchritude and did so in a typically forthright way.

Not that he went as far as Kenneth Clarke who, as a Cabinet minister, called it both peculiar and a “kind of bag”. At the time, this would have been the collective view of the government for which Mr Clarke spoke as minister without portfolio, whereas Mr Johnson’s view is that of a backbencher. However, it is hard to see why the offence today is so deep when the purpose of a burka, according to some understandings of the Koran, is to prevent a woman being seen by men outside her immediate family. She is not to “display her beauty” beyond her close relations.

This makes the howls of outrage suspect and the motivations dubious. Why would senior Conservatives want to attack so popular a figure for saying something that had been said before, and which they had not objected to? Could it be that there is a nervousness that a once and probably future leadership contender is becoming too popular and needs to be stopped? This may explain the attempt to use the Conservative Party’s disciplinary procedures, but it has been handled so ham-fistedly that it brings only sympathy and support for Mr Johnson.

The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has already said that no crime has been committed so the words of the Code of Conduct introduced with a degree of urgency last December come to the fore. These are reasonable and it is hard to see how Boris could have broken any of them. It would be absurd to call his words either victimising or harassing. Criticising a type of garment but defending the right of people to wear it is self-evidently neither. Perhaps the complaint ought to be the other way round.

The Code of Conduct sets out how a complaint should be dealt with. At stage two the party chairman is responsible for appointing a panel which reports to him at stage three, at which point he may refer it to the party leader or the board to take action. Unfortunately, both the chairman, Brandon Lewis, and the leader, Theresa May, have prejudged the issue by calling for Boris to apologise, which is arguably a breach of the Code itself. No fair system allows a critic to turn into both prosecutor and judge, so the chairman has embarrassingly had to stand aside and the leader must also excuse herself from any role in this inquiry.

When Margaret Thatcher was leader, she and Michael Heseltine were hardly soulmates, but she would not have allowed personal rivalry to take the heat off the Labour Party, whose own deep internal divisions are buried in other news now, nor would she have countenanced any attempt to have a show trial.

Attacking Boris merely helps the Opposition. It is time for good sense to assert itself, free speech to be encouraged and, as the summer rain falls, for hot-headed action to be cooled down.

Personally, I don't care Neil. He really is the son of his father. A sanctimonious, self-righteous fraud who, if he ever somehow managed to inveigle himself into leadership of this country, would do damage to so many people who could never aspire to his privileges and circumstance.

The PM is now in a very tight corner and must regret asking Johnson to apologise. Public opinion says that he said nothing wrong as do party activists and donors. Not sure where she can go from here as the disciplinary enquiry looks to in full motion and any attempt to stop it would get up the noses of those MPs who have threatened to leave the party if Johnson becomes leader.

Not soon John as both the major parties don't want to be associated with the impending disaster and leadership candidates are waiting for it all to be over so that they can't be linked to it. I suspect a second vote will be held which the politicians secretly hope for so that they can blame us for what follows. Frankly I am more interested in future funding for our run down health service, schools and police than whether we stay or go and I suspect I am in the majority.

The more I think about it any new vote would be to remain. let's not forget the young that didn't climb out of bed to vote the last time and there will be over a million that have come of voting age in the last two years.

In an extension of your logic, Howard, I think everyone that supported remain and didn't vote last time around because they thought it inconceivable, would vote this time around. In addition, in the reverse logic of the young that didn't climb out of bed, I think the over 55's screaming for Brexit would think along the lines of "Sod that, I've voted once, I'm not going to do it again. If 'they' don't like it, so be it". Big generalisation on my part but my instinct is that is what would happen.

In an extension of your logic, Howard, I think everyone that supported remain and didn't vote last time around because they thought it inconceivable, would vote this time around. In addition, in the reverse logic of the young that didn't climb out of bed, I think the over 55's screaming for Brexit would think along the lines of "Sod that, I've voted once, I'm not going to do it again. If 'they' don't like it, so be it". Big generalisation on my part but my instinct is that is what would happen.

That’s possible Neil and so is Howard’s take on the situation. Either way there will be different variables thrown into the equation. It might even be that leave supporters vote this time that didn’t bother before thinking it inconceivable or perhaps some previous Remainers might even be cheesed off at the way we have been treated by the EU and vote differently ( although an opinion you probably wouldn’t share I know! )

It will certainly be interesting that’s for sure with an uncertain outcome for either side.